Ian McKellen

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1:39If you're in London, I'd really recommend heading to their beautiful brand-new flagship store in Marlebone, which opens on the 29th of October. I'm often asked who was the inspiration for Ruthie's Table Four, and the answer is easy. It all began with Ian McKellen. For some years, Richard and I invited a collection of actors to give performances in our home. On his night, Ian gave a soliloquy from King Lear, sang a beautiful song by Sondheim, shared an anecdote about Christmas pantomimes, and read a poem by Auden. For the surprise finale, he sat on a stool with the River Cafe cookbook and read the recipe for ribolita, a traditional Tuscan soup, Compelling as any story, poem, sonnet, or song, we were all spellbound.

2:29Fifteen years later, and an idea for a podcast was born. Ian is known to everyone as different characters, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet, Gandalf. I know him as my inspiration and also as my friend. I have so many happy memories of Ian, Sunday lunches at the River Cafe, going to Paris together. and on my birthday one year he even sang my favorite Cole Porter song You're the Top

3:11Oh, that's the sweetest thing I've ever heard It's true It's true Do you remember those nights Yes, of course I do. And I have a photograph of you with the cookbook, reading it on the steps, I think, or on a stool. Well, I've been inspired by those experiences to do something similar here. What is that, darling? And the room above where we are now, I can get in 70 chairs. Yeah. And I put them on tiers so that everyone gets a good view. And I've got a very nice piano that professionals like to come and play. Andra Schiff has played in my room upstairs. Joshua Bell comes and plays the violin. Just fundraisers for various things.

4:00But I don't think I would have done it if I hadn't seen that you could turn your home into a concert hall. And the intimacy of performance is something special. You can hear the pianist breathing and hear their fingers or their nails on the keyboard. It's wonderful. So what we do is that we ask our guests to read a recipe from one of our books, but you've chosen. Oh, I'm sorry. That's fine. I can take it. And I might learn something because the recipe you're reading is very British, isn't it? I'm not a cook, but here we are. This is Queen of Puddings, and it was one my mother used to make. The ingredients for this are two ounces, and I like ounces rather than grams, I don't understand grams, so two ounces of soft white breadcrumbs, two eggs, two ounces of caster sugar, jam, two ounces of sultanas, I don't put sultanas in, ten fluid ounces of milk, an ounce of butter, a bit of grated rind of a lemon, and that's it.

5:08It says here you boil the milk with the butter, And you pour on the breadcrumbs and you add the sugar and the rind and you stir thoroughly. You beat the egg yolks and you beat each into buttered pie dish and you refrigerate for 40 minutes. I don't suppose I'd do that. Then you bake it at level four on gas, middle shelf, until delicately springy. I do like that in recipes when there's something really homely and means what it says. You whip the egg whites very stiffly. that's to make a meringue. You put the jam on top of the breadcrumbs. You pipe or fork the egg whites over the top and you bake in the oven for 10 minutes.

5:55Couldn't be easier. And it's absolutely delicious, but it was something you could manage during the war. Well, let's talk about that because you were born in 1939. I was, just before the war started in Lancashire. Do you have a First Food memory? Do you remember...? Well, we were living in Wigan, which is in Lancashire, a coal mining town. The big towns nearby, like Manchester and Liverpool, were bombed regularly, and the only bombs we ever saw were those very few that were discarded before the Germans flew back east. So there were only two bombs in the whole of the war in Wigan. so safe was it that we had evacuees.

6:40We had a family of evacuees. It was considered a safe place to take children. Yes. And how my mother managed, I don't know, suddenly having to share the tiny kitchen with another woman who had two children. How we all fitted into our house, I don't know. What was the house like? Describe your house. It had four bedrooms, but it was a semi-detached house in the street near the centre of Wigan with a lovely aspect in both front over the park and at the back over the cricket club. Bit squeezed inside, I suppose. Well, we all shared bits. I can't really remember. But food. Do you remember the kitchen?

7:20Yes, the kitchen was... We had a fire which heated the oven. No fridge, of course. There was a little room which we called the pantry, which was relatively cool. But this would be, if you were born in 39, so you're aware of your memories of food in your house, in the kitchen, you would have been about 4 or 5, which was about 1944, 45. I was very aware of the rationing. What was it like? Tell me about rationing. My mother liked to bake. Yeah. In order to bake, you needed sugar, you needed fat, and the rationing was two ounces of butter a week per person and four ounces of margarine and one egg.

8:08Now, there was dried egg, which was the equivalent of three eggs. You had that for a week, so she could bake with that. Sugar, again, severely rationed. And the way we got round things, that's probably illegal. we used to swap our rations for tea and coffee which we didn't drink and took from those people who desperately needed their fix sugar or fat and it was always my job on a Saturday when the groceries arrived I would take half a pound of butter which was for four of us double that amount of margarine put it in a big bowl take the top off the milk, there was always cream on top of the milk, and put those three bits of fat together and in front of the fire warm it and beat it until it was a paste.

9:04The butter and margarine? That was the butter for the week. And it always ran out on a Thursday. If your mother would make, would she bake? Would she say, OK, children, we're not having butter on toast, we're going to save the butter, we're not going to fry something in butter, We're going to save it for the cake. Dry butter, yes. And that went to what year was that? Well, that went right through the war, really. But I don't ever remember being hungry. You weren't hungry or a sense of denial. And there was always a pudding. There was. Always a pudding. So you were living in a house with your mother, your father, and your sister?

9:41My oldest sister, yes. And yourself. So there were four of you. There were four of us. And then three arrived, mother and two children. They were just with us for a year. I don't remember any arguments. I remember the lad teaching me how to tie my shoelaces. There was a pattern of life. Yeah. Like washing was always done on a Monday. Tuesday was ironing. Do you remember? My mother was cooking all the time. Yeah, your mother was cooking. She was a cook. I don't remember my father ever cooking anything apart from toast. And did you go in the kitchen? Would she ever say, Ian, come and watch? Oh, I was done the whole time.

10:21Can I have the bowl? Can I have the bowl? Really? And there was a pattern with the food. Because we went to church on Sunday and she didn't want to cook on a Sunday, we always had a roast, but we had it on a Saturday. So that was our big meal of the week. On Sunday, we would have the cold meat. And on Monday, always, we had the minced meat and turned into shepherd's pie. Yeah. And then we got to get through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and that's when it would be baked beans on toast as the main meal, which we called the tea. We might manage a salad with a bit of ham, maybe, two ounces a week.

11:07And there was probably a Friday or two where we didn't have quite enough to eat, but I didn't really notice that. Was it a solitary life? Did you feel that your mother had friends and you had friends and people? Oh, yes. The house was very social. You said that you enjoyed being with people. Churchguards, so there were all those friends. Was your father a preacher? He was a lay preacher. So we were very Christian. You grew up in a house that loved culture as well. There was piano music. There was, you know, art. We didn't think of it as culture. We thought of it as lovely pastime. And Dad played the piano.

11:46Jean, my sister, learned the piano. I learned the piano for a bit. Visitors always dropping by, close friends, everything within walking distance, you know, no car, bikes we had. And once a year or twice a year, close together in the autumn, we'd go blackberrying. That was a great thrill. You could get food for free off the bushes. Extraordinary. Did your mother ever make summer pudding with the black currants? Summer pudding, absolutely. I love summer pudding, yeah. Because all you needed in that was a bit of sugar, and you could probably use saccharin, and some breadcrumbs, really. We make it in the River Cafe.

12:28You have to come. We make it with currants, raspberries. Now this is not a rationing summer pudding, but in Val Policella. We cook the berries and the currants down, and then we line a beautiful bowl with bread, slices of bread. Yes. And then you put the fruit in. Yes, right. And then you close it with the bread and you press it down and then you leave it and then you demould it. And it is one of my favourites. With a bit of cream. The British do a lot of puddings with bread, don't they? The recipe you eat. They like using up the bread. But, you know, everything was rationed. I can remember the first banana.

13:09When was that? That would be about 1944. Where were you? I was at home, and Mrs. Barron next door came in, and she said, I've got something to show you, a banana. When I'd heard about bananas, I knew they weren't straight. And she came in with this four-inch banana, and we were all allowed to hold it and imagine what it might be like inside. And then it was explained that you peeled it off. There was the banana. Mrs. Barron mashed it up, and the five kids, Gene and I and the three next door, shared a banana sandwich. It was probably quite a healthy diet. Well, they say that rationally you didn't have sugar, you didn't have teeth, you didn't have sweets, and people weren't overweight.

14:00You would see sometimes rolling out of a pub, we never went to pubs, of course, because we didn't drink, some woman with a huge arse. and I was riveted by it. I would follow them down the street. I'd never seen anything like it. No, you're right. We were all thin. But I suppose healthy. Sometimes it was very exciting. School, we went to school and food parcels arrived from North America. I think Canada. And I remember bringing back, I couldn't believe it, a huge two-pound bag of cocoa powder and presented it to my mother. I loved her so much. What was she like, Ian? Aw. She was beautiful. She was pretty.

14:54Her nature was very gentle. She had a rather flamboyant younger sister. She was the one who made the jokes, but it was my mother who was always laughing. But she loved going to the theatre, and so did Dad. and she did a little bit of acting when she was a kid, in church socials and so on. And I suppose she was crazy about me, her little boy. Long after the war, when we'd moved from Wigan to Bolton, she was only 44 and got breast cancer. I wasn't told. I was 11 or 12. and I went off on a school camp for a couple of weeks and she was by that time sleeping downstairs. She couldn't manage to walk upstairs.

15:48And while I was away, she died. Did they tell you? And I've not got over it yet. Of course you haven't. So when she died, I was bereft, really, and I didn't know I was bereft. and my father very generously, not just for his own sake, he remarried, I think partly to give me a mother and my stepmother Gladys was very good at that job and a reasonable cook herself. What was she like? She was short, she was from Liverpool. She'd been a secretary, I think, all her life and in her early 40s, finally married. handsome Dennis McCallan.

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18:04Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home. Right now, you can shop up to 60 % off storewide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Add a little... to your life. Offers are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. Do you think that the rationing and the discipline and the lack of food has stayed with you all your life?

18:45Do you still think about wastage or about excess? Oh, I see. Well, one way in which it's certainly affected my life is my parents were T-Total. They'd taken the pledge, which is what young people did in the 20s, swore off drink. And we didn't drink tea or coffee, so the only thing we drank was water out of the tap, very nice water. And I never developed a taste for alcohol. And three years ago, what was it for now, I stopped drinking alcohol altogether. So that really stayed with me. I do, I was deeply shocked when I first went to America and saw the size of portions that people had. But you were that afraid.

19:28Because, you know, the food will be put on your plate as a kid and you will eat it. Whether you enjoy it or not is not the point. You must finish everything. Think of the starving children in China, we were told. And the day I knew I was an adult was when I went to Cambridge and on the first day in my little gown, sat with other boys in the dining hall and was waited on by people. And we had venison. Venison! For goodness sake. Now, this is way after the war. And cabbage, I think it was, on the side. And I went my way through the venison. I didn't much like it. And I decided I wouldn't finish the cabbage and I left it on the table, on the plate.

20:14I'd never, until I was age 18, left anything on my plate. and I knew away from home I'd done that and that I was now an adult. I apparently spoke in a funny way. I mean, I was mocked for my accent. What's the accent like? Well, it was something like this, really. It would be a little bit broader than I allow myself to be. But I could never say the word one. I always said one, one. Well, horrible little boys from public school would point at me and mock me. And so I tried to speak like they did, rather poshly, and didn't succeed. Of late, I've let my own accent come back and feel much happier. Good, yeah.

21:00And so at Cambridge, you were exposed to medicine and meals in the college, but you also, did you have enough money to go to restaurants in Cambridge? Would you go out with your friends to a pub and eat some? Well, the great discovery at Cambridge was the Indian restaurant. And I used to have egg curry, which was a hard-boiled egg with a curry. Oh, delicious. So that's the first time I really went out as an adult and independent. So you were acting in Cambridge. Were you with Derek Jacoby in Cambridge? Derek was there. Who else was there? Five Swift, a lot of people who went into the business.

21:41Yes? We spent, those of us who were really keen, spent all our time acting rather than studying. I never learned how to be a good student. What were you studying? What was the course you went into? English literature. English literature, yeah. And so you were able to direct? Did you act? I didn't direct. No, I just acted. Had you had any education in acting? No. Did you have none? I'd just done some. You've never? at school. Yes, before I went to Cambridge, I'd played Henry V, Prince Hal in the earlier... Henry IV. I'd played girls' parts. We also had a little miniature theatre, it was called, just down the road from the school.

22:24A theatre that held about 50 audience members, and we did constant programmes of one-act plays all the time. And if you did that, you were allowed to miss PT. And what was it like when you left Cambridge? Did you have a domestic situation where you had to cook for yourself? Well, yes, I went straight off and got a job in a repertory company. Most major cities had a repertory company. There'd be a group of actors who stayed together for a year and did a different play every two weeks or three weeks. And Coventry was such a place. at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, and I was in that company. Do you remember the first...?

23:08It was all very post-war and optimistic. Coventry had been appallingly bombed, of course, but the centre of the town rebuilt with a theatre, a modern theatre, with little flats attached, and I paid half my weekly salary to pay for this flat. Just across the car park was the hole-in-the-wall pub, which is about now in 2024 to close down forever more but a big part of our lives, we always went there after the show. You did. And we were allowed to stay there after hours and drink with the policemen. Is that something you still do now? Do you like to go after a performance? Do you go out with friends?

23:48No, I don't go out to pubs because I don't drink. But do you go to restaurants after a night in the theatre? Yes, I do but not as a matter of course. No, I'm happy to get back home and make myself a sandwich. So I'd probably eat things on toast all the time. And we couldn't afford to go out to a restaurant. You didn't go to any local restaurants? No, no, no. Yeah. No. But when I first came to live in London in 1964 in King's Road, the unfashionable end in those days near World's End, I was living with some friends, sharing a flat with three or four other people. And we did sometimes go out to a restaurant.

24:36Yes, it was a thrill. I felt terribly grown up. And of course, at that time, being gay was still illegal, wasn't it? Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yes, I went right through Cambridge and right through my 20s in a country where you could be imprisoned for making love. Yeah. But because it was just what it was, you didn't... I lived with my boyfriend in our own flat in London, and he was a good cook, and that's when I began to start cooking properly. It's always my job to do the roast. It's easy, isn't it, to roast? But we lived very perfectly openly. Everybody knew we lived together. We always went out together.

25:27We wouldn't hold hands, of course, in public. That would be to draw attention. I didn't talk to the family about being gay, but I didn't feel that I was living a repressed life. I had to rather be taught that. It was only when the government wanted to pass a law to restrict how much schools could discuss homosexuality that I realised that I was being treated by the law as a second-class citizen, and this particular law was going to make it worse, then I got annoyed and angry and joined in the fight to stop Section 28 and then amend the other laws that already existed. And then Stonewall. Yes, which we did through the lobby group Stonewall.

26:14That brought you into and engaged with your success as an actor and being travelling. Did you travel to other countries? Did you arrive in France or Italy or Germany and think, this is also a completely... As far as food's concerned. Food, yeah, food or culture or just being in a foreign country, what did that make you think? Yes. Think. Again, in my childhood, a visit abroad was a very unusual thing. Did you go abroad with your parents? My mother never left the country. My father, who liked walking and climbing mountains, was a bit more adventurous. And he did go abroad during my childhood to Germany, where we had connections with German Christians who we'd corresponded with during the war.

27:08And in 1954, I went to Germany with my dad. and I had my first glass of wine on sailing up the Rhine. I thought it was disgusting. You can remember your first glass of wine. I thought it was disgusting. Disgusting. It was white wine. It was just like sour. It was so sour. Perhaps it was sour. Perhaps it was a bit of old cheap wine. But now when you travel for work or when you travel, do you enjoy thinking about a different culture of food? Do you know if you go to Italy? Where do you go? Well, you go to France and it's all meat, isn't it? And I don't eat meat.

27:50Except occasional pork pie, occasional sausage. That's what Richard Ayer said. I asked Richard Ayer about you and he said he's a vegetarian, but a few lapses every once in a while. But I'm not a strict vegetarian. It's just I don't have a taste for meat. Yeah. So I don't feel guilty when I have a little sausage. At Christmas, it's all the trimmings I like. I don't want the turkey. And all those feasts in Shakespeare. Tell me the plays with the great feasts that you... Well, it's a joke that actors in the old days working in these regional companies not being paid enough money or getting enough to eat would say, oh we're doing Chekhov there's a practical pork pie in the third act so stage management will provide something that you could actually eat yeah free free food so that's the eating that I remember as Chekhov rather than than Shakespeare Macbeth where there's a feast going on but I don't think Macbeth's in a fit state, looking at the ghost of a man he's killed, to be bothered about what's on the table.

29:10If you like listening to Ruthie's Table 4, would you please make sure to rate and review the podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

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